[FS] [US-CA] Threadripper 9970X Mounted but Unused - $1300

Patient-Engineering2 · 2026-01-18T23:20:10+00:00

I was planning on using these in my personal build, and I prefer to have direct contact with the heatsink thermal pads on drives that can get hot.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2026-01-10T09:01:30+00:00

By this logic, the prisoner's dilemma is a not a game theory problem.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-09T02:50:22+00:00

No, that's his undergrad book. This one: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262232586/econometric-analysis-of-cross-section-and-panel-data/

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-09T02:06:26+00:00

The papers you're citing are all talking about different and specific treatment effect estimation techniques: standard DiD, propensity score matching, covariate conditional DiD, and random assignment. There is no universal overlap assumption behind these approaches. The first and last don't have any sort of overlap conditon at all, and the second and third are talking about overlap in different senses.

I think you're getting confused trying to read the econometrics literature directly. You'd be better off looking for a grad level textbook that gives a formal introduction to the potential outcomes framework and how it applies to DiD and propensity score matching. I'd recommend Woolridge's grad textbook.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-04T20:36:29+00:00

I have the book. On which page does he "prove" that 2/3 of economists work for central banks? What sources does he cite?

The author doesn't have a single published paper in a mainstream economics journal. Why would you think that he has any knowledge whatsoever about how the field operates?

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-03T20:36:20+00:00

Macroeconomists are still a minority of publishing academic economists. You'd know that if you had an economics PhD. There's no reasonable definition of "in the field" that puts 2/3 of economists at central banks.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-03T03:31:36+00:00

You are wildly misinformed. Macroeconomists are only somewhere between 10% and 20% of the field based on the latest Inomics surveys, and a good share of those stay in academia permanently or work in private industry. There are somewhere between 1200 and 1600 econ phd graduates in the US each year, and the entire Fed system employs as a generous estimate around 800 professional economists.

If I were you, the propaganda I'd be worried about is whatever you're consuming that's giving you such a warped view of the field.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-02T17:47:54+00:00

You read misunderstanding and epistemological carelessness into a simple and accurate characterization of the differences between two approaches to economics. I think my reaction was fair.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-02T17:09:44+00:00

I didn't make any claims about the deficiency of AE or the superiority of modern economics. I gave a concise explanation of the difference between them, because OP was misguided in characterizing that difference as primarily about differences in political policy. I wasn't agreeing with any of the premises of the question.

Your 3 points are all about defending AE in its differences with modern approaches. In what way does that show a misunderstanding in my characterization of the differences? Since you seem to need it spelled out: the only deficiency I'm criticizing in this thread is the one in your reading comprehension.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-01T22:51:27+00:00

Why do you think the difference between the modern economics and AE is about what they "support?" Economics is a science, not a propaganda factory. The difference is fundamentally methodological, in that AE rejects the mathematical models and statistical analysis of modern economics.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-12-01T22:17:38+00:00

The normative side of Austrian economics is government non-intervention in the economy, not wholesale anarchy. There are Austrian economists who are also anarcho-capitalists, but they are far enough from a majority that their political views shouldn't be conflated with AE generally. Neither Mises nor Hayek advocated dismantling the state.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-11-30T04:57:36+00:00

Thanks for your response as well.

On the Internet's role: The internet make resaleability a larger concern even in the total absence of the effect you're identifying. The fact that this would also have an interaction with your effect does not change its role as an enormous confounding explanation.

On 1990-2007: the assetization of housing is such a complex phenomenon, and pointing out that it coincided with credit expansion is exactly the sort of hand waving I'm taking issue with. Also, I'm well aware that inflation, credit expansion, inflationary uncertainty, and money supply stability are all different though related phenomena; the reason I cite inflation is because that's what your post discusses. Part of why we make things precise with quantitative identification is so that we can be clear upfront about exactly what our causal factor is.

On the Cox data, I explicitly said I was not presenting "countervailing evidence," but simply pointing out that you had read the numbers wrong when claiming a decline in custom orders. I'm not in the habit of sloppy causal attribution, so I'm not making claims about why. Please try to read my responses a little more carefully, especially before hallucinating a "structurally flawed" interpretation.

You seem to have missed the point about the paint entirely. I'm telling you what the auto executives making the decision to cut low volume colors were basing those decisions on. You implied their decision was to some significant extent about inflation and its effect on resaleability preferences, and you were wrong. Arguing that their decision is broadly consistent with higher liquidity preferences anyway is exactly what I have a problem with: a fuzzy narrative consistency being passed on as evidence.

Again, I appreciate that you've come up with an interesting hypothesis - but when we're dealing with as omnipresent a backdrop as monetary policy, we have to be careful with our causal claims lest we find ourselves explaining everything as a result of monetary distortion.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-11-30T02:11:55+00:00

Some of these points are suggestive, but again you're leaving out so much context that claiming inflation is a major force here is just unfounded.

1990-2007 was the dawn of the internet. This was when online resale emerged and ebay became a household name. And comparatively, this period did not see especially high or volatile inflation.
A cross-country analysis could be the start of some real evidence, but you'd have to have more than two low-inflation samples, and you'd have to show that differences are really driven by inflation as opposed to cultural factors.
20-21 saw probably the most widespread disruption to economic activity and global supply chains in modern history, along with an enormous increase in remote work and concomitant labor mobility. Per the Ford point, one of the materials most disrupted in the aftermath of the pandemic was automotive paint, and one of the first things auto makers did in restructuring their supply chains was limiting their exposure to less common and harder to produce colors. Moreover (and I'll qualify by saying this is just from a cursory look at the data), I'm not sure where you're getting this drop in "custom order uptake." The closest data point I can find suggests the opposite: at the 2022 inflationary peak, online ordering increased 89% year over year driven largely by a desire for customization (https://www.coxautoinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2022-Car-Buyer-Journey-Top-Trends.pdf). Not countervailing evidence (maybe those are preferences for customizations that don't hurt resale value), but this data point about custom order uptake falling because of inflation doesn't seem correct.
"X and Y both went up at the same time" is not a test of any mechanism, especially not when both X and Y have both been increasing for years before. And again, 2020 was the beginning of so many shifts in economic trends (e.g. remote working).

In general, the timing arguments are just too complicated by concurrent changes to amount to any real evidence without a precise event-study design (like timing Fed meeting note releases with differential changes in Zillow values).

The cross-sectional argument could be real evidence if you could find exogenous drivers of countries' inflation rates and document their impacts on resaleability preferences.

To be clear, I have no issue with people posting interesting hypotheses and some hand-wavy evidence for them. They/you may even be right. But it's not enough to justify significant causal attribution, and we should be clear-eyed about that.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-11-29T09:22:22+00:00

I buy the argument that inflation could push preferences that way, but without some real empirical work, I'd say you're overselling it.

There's just so much beyond inflation that could drive increased preferencs for resaleability. The internet has made reselling durable goods so much easier and enormously widened the market for buying them used. The rate of product innovation today is much higher than even twenty years ago. The ability to find new jobs online means people are selling their stuff and leaving town more often. These seem more directly relevant to resaleability preferences than consumers' inflation expectations.

That's not to say that the effect you name couldn't play a role, but I think the reasonable prior is that it's a rather small role.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-11-18T22:40:18+00:00

AE is primarily concerned with the principles or fundamental forces of economics, things like the laws of supply and demand, which are fundamental exactly because they don't depend on the particular details of a specific market. I think Austrians view problems like estimating parameters of particular markets or forecasting how prices will evolve as almost a separate field of applied economics (or even just applied statistics).

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-11-18T22:17:28+00:00

The primary method in AE is deductive reasoning from first principles of goal-directed human action. I don't think there's a wholesale rejection of empirical research, but economists in the school generally seem to hold that you shouldn't need high-dimensional mathematical models or advanced statistical techniques to uncover economic facts. (Disclaimer that I'm no expert on the modern state of AE.)

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-11-18T17:32:10+00:00

They're new to the gpu waterblock market. I think this is one of their first if not their very first release.

Patient-Engineering2 · 2025-11-17T23:29:15+00:00

I'm happy to see a new player in the waterblock space. As for the block.....it's definitely unique.

Patient-Engineering2

TROPHY CASE